Time, uncertainty make plane hunt uniquely hard

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Rob Griffith/The Associated Press

Royal Australian Air Force Sgt. Matthew Falanga scans the southern Indian Ocean from the window of an AP-3C Orion during the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Officials on Tuesday narrowed the search area, but it still covers more than 600,000 square miles of deep ocean with a fickle system of currents.

CANBERRA, Australia
— Not one object has been recovered from the missing airliner that
Malaysian officials are now convinced plunged into the southern Indian
Ocean 17 days ago. Some of the pieces are likely 3,500 meters (11,500
feet) underwater. Others are bobbing in a fickle system of currents that
one oceanographer compares to a pinball machine. And by now, they could
easily be hundreds of kilometers (miles) away from each other.

The
job of gathering this wreckage, and especially the black boxes that
will help determine what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, is an
unprecedented challenge. The crews who needed two years to find a black
box from the Air France flight lost in the Atlantic in 2009 had much
more information to go on.

"Even
though that was the biggest and most complicated search for an aircraft
in the ocean ever conducted, it was a relatively refined area compared
with what we're talking about here," said U.S. underwater wreck hunter
David Mearns, who advised both British and French investigators in the
Air France case.

Malaysia
said the latest search area had been narrowed to about 870,000 square
kilometers (335,000 square miles, 470,000 square nautical miles), an
area about as big as Texas and Oklahoma combined.

It
was analysis of satellite data, rather than any confirmed wreckage,
that led Malaysia to conclude Monday that Flight 370 plunged into the
Indian Ocean 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) southwest of the Australian
west coast city of Perth, and that all 239 people aboard died.
Satellites and planes have seen objects in the water, large and small,
but nothing has been retrieved or positively identified as coming from
the Boeing 777-200.

Geoff
Dell, discipline leader of accident investigation at Central Queensland
University, said Tuesday that if the black boxes are found, it would be
the most difficult search for a lost plane ever to succeed.

"We're
not searching for a needle in a haystack," said Air Marshal Mark
Binskin, Australia's deputy defense chief. "We're still trying to define
where the haystack is."

Dell
said there's an urgent need to find any wreckage from the plane. Even
one piece would allow oceanographers to plot where it might have drifted
from. That information, combined with the vague course of the plane
calculated by British satellite company Inmarsat, could greatly refine
the search area for pieces that have sunk.

"You've
got a rough idea of the flight path from this satellite data. Using
your best guesses, you've got to backtrack from where you've fished the
pieces out of the water, based on current and wind," Dell said. "You're
looking for those two paths to intersect and that would be your starting
point, but there'd be many, many variables, estimations and tolerances
in both of those paths."

The
estimated paths of the flight and the current would produce "an
X-marks-the-spot where we start looking, but it could be a couple of
hundred miles off," he said.

The
job gets harder every day the current carries wreckage away, said Erik
van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales in
Sydney. He said the swirling and unpredictable nature of currents can
spread items that begin in the same place hundreds of kilometers (miles)
apart within weeks.

"It's like one giant pinball machine out there," he said.

Weather is further complicating the task. The search was suspended for 24 hours Tuesday due to rough seas.

Binskin,
the Australian deputy defense chief, said search planes had dropped
electronic buoys near potential debris fields that have been seen in
recent days, in hopes of keeping track of them.

Australian
Defense Minister David Johnston said, "The turning point for us, I
think, will be when we pull some piece of debris from the surface of the
ocean and positively identify it as being part of the aircraft."

The search involves ships and planes from the United States, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.

Malaysia
said the U.S. Navy will deliver a black box pinger locator to Perth on
Wednesday. The Australian warship that will tow the locator is due to
arrive in the search area on April 5. By then, there may be little time
left.

By
law, the boxes must be able to send those signals for at least 30 days
following a crash. But experts say they can continue making noise for
another 15 days or so beyond that, depending on the strength of the
black box battery.

Hans
Weber, the president and owner of TECOP International, a San
Diego-based aviation consulting firm, said that if the black boxes are
submerged, the effectiveness of the pinging they emit can be affected by
variations in water temperature.

He
said the ocean can form layers of water that are different
temperatures, and that sometimes the pinging can effectively be
reflected back by a different layer of water. He said the pinging works
best in water that has a uniform temperature.

Dell
said if the black boxes were several kilometers (miles) deep, the ships
might need to be almost directly over them before the signal could
detect them.

If
found in deep water, Dell expected that unmanned submarines would be
needed to retrieve them. That's how the black box from Air France Flight
447 was retrieved in May 2011, almost two years after the Airbus A330
crashed with the loss of 228 lives.

Mearns,
the wreck hunter, said this week that Malaysian plane search is far
more complex "because with Air France they knew the flight plan of the
plane, the track of the plane, the last known position." The last 280
seconds of the plane's path were unclear, he said, compared to several
hours for Flight 370.

And it did not take 17 days to find wreckage from Flight 447. Within five days, more than 100 pieces of debris were found.

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